Nothing Is Funnier

There's a lot to laugh about when a funny joke is told. It could be the wordplay, the delivery, the sheer amount of silly puns being thrown rapid-fire, or all manner of things. Jokes are funny, and are a great way to make people laugh.

Sometimes, however, the best comedy is something only the viewer can imagine. For instance, let's say there exists a location called "Big Tit Creek". Sure, you could go into detail, about how the creek was actually named after a large bird of the tit family, but it would be funnier to just let the viewer wonder, "How DID the creek get that name?"

As Nothing Is Scarier refers to the concept of leaving the object of fear to the viewer to think about, this is leaving things to the imagination of the viewer when it comes to comedy because nothing you could come up with could be funnier than whatever outlandish scenario they thought up. However, the two could still overlap in Black Comedy.

In short, the writer leaves out details, because of Rule of Funny.

Compare and contrast with Worse with Context. Related to Don't Explain the Joke. See also, Take Our Word for It.

Subtropes include:

• Ambiguous Criminal History: A character is known to have committed a serious crime, but it's never explained.
• Ambiguously Trained: The most probable reason why an Inexplicably Awesome character is like that is because he saw military service, but the story refuses to reveal it outright.
• Big Ball of Violence: Some fights are funnier when left to the imagination.
• Censored for Comedy: It's so disgusting you can only see vaguely what it looks like behind censor pixels.
• Clingy Aquatic Life: A character gets out of the water, revealing that sea creatures got stuck to them or inside them somehow.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: You don't need to know what exotic words someone is using to imagine how bad (and funny) it is.
• Comic Sutra: Head-Tiltingly Kinky sexual acts with vague or poetic names (e.g. "Crossing the Silk Scarves") which are never described in detail and of course never shown, the better to let the audience imagine what they might be.
• Gilligan Cut: "I'm never doing that!" Cut to them doing that. How it happened is better skipped over.
• Inanimate Competitor: An inanimate object is involved in a competition somehow. Bonus points if they've apparently done something offscreen.
• Narrative Profanity Filter: Stating or implying that a character used profanity, often leaving the exact words to the imagination.
• Newhart Phone Call: The audience only hears one side of a phone conversation and has to imagine the other half themselves, usually based on what the one they can hear is saying.
• Noodle Implements: A bunch of seemingly-outlandish requirements for a task are given, leaving the viewer to imagine their use.
• Noodle Incident: A mysterious incident constantly referred to but never seen or explained.
• Offscreen Crash: No writer could come up with a more chaotic scene than your imagination can.
• Orphaned Punchline: When the end of a joke is told, and the beginning is left for the viewer to try and imagine.
• Orphaned Setup: The beginning of a joke is told, but the punchline is left out.
• Relax-o-Vision: Discretion Shot for the purpose of a gag.
• Stealth Pun: Implying a pun without actually saying it aloud.
• Subverted Punchline: When a potential bit of wordplay is waved in the audiences' faces and then ignored.
• That Poor Car: Some big accident happens offscreen, setting off a car alarm, or several car alarms.
• That Poor Cat: Some big accident happens offscreen, and based on the yowl, a cat was involved somehow.
• Undisclosed Funds: Take our word for it, this is a lot of money.
• You Do Not Want To Know: Something is apparently so unmentionable, the characters have to tell other characters (and the audience) that really, they don't want to know the specifics.

Example subpages:

• Calvin and Hobbes

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Examples:

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes has its own page on the subject. It's also the Trope Namer for Noodle Incident. Whatever the aforesaid "noodle incident" was, Calvin swears up and down that he was innocent, but wrongly blamed. Any particulars of the incident are never addressed. Instead, just bringing up the Noodle Incident would cause Calvin to immediately go into a panicked defense, insisting that it wasn't him or that no one could prove it, all played for comedy. Comic author Bill Watterson said in the Tenth Anniversary Calvin and Hobbes Collection that he intended to visit what happened the Noodle Incident someday, but eventually talked himself out of it. The reason he never explained what happened during the Noodle Incident was that he decided nothing he could come up with would ever be as funny as anything the readers would be able to come up with in their own minds.

Fan Works

• Naru-Hina Chronicles Mini-sodes: Ino decides to pull a prank on Naruto by claiming that the girls changing room (where Hinata is currently changing into a two-piece swimsuit) is actually unisex. Naruto enters it and Ino is waiting to hear a major reaction. However, she's confused when she hears nothing. She looks into the changing room and says "Oh, that explains it.", but what she's seeing is not shown.

Film—Live Action

• In the Marvel short film The Consultant, Sitwell and Coulson are tasked with figuring out how to keep General Ross from agreeing to let the Abomination (a villain so strong/destructive he makes the Hulk look self-controlled) join the Avengers Initiative. They decide to send Tony Stark as their representative to the negotiation. We don't see exactly what happened during the discussion, but the result was: Ross refused to release the Abomination, and Stark bought the bar that the negotiation was held at just so he could demolish it. All we know is that Ross and Tony didn't like each other before the meeting, and they liked each other a lot less after.

Game Shows

• Taskmaster:
  • One episode has a task where a contestant must be blind-folded, but the one who won was able to see a bit because Alex didn't fit the blindfold properly. Greg assures us that Alex will be punished, but without giving any details about what will be done to him other than apparently it happens quite often.
    Greg: It's not your fault! You're not disqualified! It's not your fault! There's only one person to blame for you being able to see, and that's the person as you quite rightly pointed out fitting the equipment, and he'll be punished off-camera in the traditional way!
    Alex: Not the traditional way!
    Greg: YES THE TRADITIONAL WAY!!!
  • Another has Munya Chawawa bring in "The Suckertron 3000" for the prize task, a small handheld vacuum, and assures the audience that it's not the official name and thus, for obvious reasons, you probably shouldn't Google it. Alex does exactly that on his tablet while Munya talks, is visibly disturbed, by what he finds, and then shows it to Greg. The audience doesn't get to see what he found, only their reactions.
    Alex: OOOOOOH! That looks like it smells!

Jokes

• "Knock knock!" "Who's there?" "Awkward silence." "..."

Literature

• The classic example from Three Men in a Boat is the scene where the hapless characters, who have embarked on an ill-advised and poorly planned boating holiday down the Thames, attempt to open a stubborn sealed can with a tree, as nobody remembered to pack a can-opener; the only details the author provides the reader with are the fact that a straw hat saved the life of one, while another escaped with only minor injuries. The humour comes from the way the author avoids describing exactly what happened and leaves it up to the reader to guess.

Live-Action TV

• Saturday Night Live: In this sketch, Steve Martin and Bill Murray stand and stare at an unknown object and ask "What the hell is that?" ad nauseam. The audience is left to imagine what the object looks like.

Video Games

• During the Sonic Juice fight in No More Heroes III, Travis is asked why he doesn't like RPGs. He elaborates by saying the entire genre was ruined by one game because the characters looked 'fucking'... Both the name of the game and the adjective used to describe them are bleeped out. The characters even repeat the word a few times to hammer in that we don't get to know what it is.
• At one point in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Cal asks his robot companion BD-1 for a joke. Thing is, Cal understands BD-1's language while we do not:
  Cal: You, uh, know any jokes, BD?
  BD-1: Be-beep! Boo bee trill beep boo?
  Cal: I dunno. Why?
  BD-1: Boo trill bee boop!
  Cal: Ha! Classic!
• In Tales of Berseria, Eizen's "Reaper's Curse" means that any coin he flips will land on "tails". Rokurou and Eleanor try to "Beat" it by having Eizen flip a two-headed coin. The first time, a crow snatches it mid-air. The second time, a gryphon who resides at the location snatches it. The third time, all that's heard is a "boom" noise followed by Rokurou saying You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!.

Web Animation

• Stupid Kids: Bazsi asks an unseen audience where to hide Dani's gift then gets disgusted by their unheard suggestion in Boldogat és még boldogabbat (Merry and even more).

Western Animation

• This is what helps sell one the funniest scenes in Batman: The Animated Series, specifically "Joker's Millions". At one point, Joker appears to swear off crime after inheriting a fortune, yet inexplicably sends his accountant in his place (complete with badly done makeup) to the Iceberg lounge while Bruce Wayne also happens to be there. Sensing something amiss, Batman investigates when 'Joker' walks off to the bathroom. Discovering the switch, he interrogates the accountant, who claims ignorance. Batman proceeds to give the man a Swirlie in an upper-class club lavatory. We don't get to see this happen; all we get are the sounds of frantic pleading followed by extremely loud and repeated flushing, and the disquieted reaction of Penguin, who is right outside the bathroom door and decides against intervening to spare himself the trouble. This forces us to imagine Batman bullying this hapless pencil-neck accountant in a bad Joker outfit by shoving him headfirst into a toilet, and the mental image that conjures up is doubtless funnier than anything that could have been animated.
• Chowder: In the episode "Sing Beans," Schnitzel tells a joke that makes Mung crack up, though Chowder's just confused (Mung refuses to explain it, saying Chowder will get it when he's older). Due to Schnitzel's One-Word Vocabulary, the audience has no idea what the joke is, just that it's very dirty, leaving viewers (especially older ones) to fill in the gaps with their own dirty jokes.
• Megas XLR: In his second appearance in the series Magnanimous returns despite having been sucked into a miniature black hole. His only response as to how he escaped was that “it wasn’t easy”. The hilarity comes not just from the vagueness of his answer, but also from the fact that one of the casualties he apparently suffered from his escape was an eye twitch (and he seems to be more upset about that than the scar he received on his other eye).
• The Patrick Star Show: In "Best Served Cold", Gladys is currently reading an expose called Secret Evil: The Untold Truth of the Easter Bunny. Exactly what this is "untold truth" is never explained and left to the viewer's imagination.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: "St. Olga's Reform School for Wayward Princesses" has a visual gag involving Star running offscreen in a panic to hide at the mention of St. Olga's. It cuts to a wide shot of the room with Star's legs kicking from beneath a rug… only for Star to emerge from a different location. The second time this happens, Marco questions the legs, but Star's response only raises more questions.
  Marco: What's that under your rug?
  Star: I have no idea, but I do know one thing. Never ever step on it.
• Green Eggs and Ham (2019): In "There", Gluntz uses a technique to stupefy the Goat, trapping him in what she claims is a happy memory. We're never shown the memory, just the Goat screaming "AAAAAAH! NOOOOOO!"
• We Bare Bears episode "My Clique" features the bears and Chloe playing charades. We watch Panda and Grizz struggle hard at the game, but Ice Bear quickly manages to nail every single answer just from Chloe's gestures. Conveniently, the camera stops focusing on Chloe and instead closes up on Ice Bear once the prompts go from simple (pizza, Statue of Liberty, snowman) to far more complex and wacky (Richard Nixon, Old Faithful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), leaving it up to the audience to guess what exactly Chloe must be doing off-camera.

Real Life

• James Joyce was in the same room as a drunk F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald wanted to kiss Joyce's hand to show his admiration. Joyce said, "If you knew where that hand had been, young man, you wouldn't be kissing it."

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